This dissertation consists of a translation of the first fourteen chapters of Hayasirsa Pancaratra and a detailed analysis aiming at its contextualization in historical, cultural, and theological milieus. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra is a Sanskrit text from approximately the ninth century A.D. primarily dealing with rituals concerning the construction of a temple to the god Visnu. The text is probably from Eastern India, most likely Bengal or Orissa. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra belongs to the Pancaratra tradition, a Visnu centered movement within what we today call Hinduism. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra has incorporated older texts, most of which are no longer extant, and has also been a source-text for later works, most notably the Agni Purâṇa and the Hari Bhakta Vilasa. The text is named after Hayasirsa, the horse-headed incarnation of Visnu, who represents Visnu's divine character as revealer of úruti. This is the first time that the Hayasirsa Pancaratra has been translated. The text is important for Sanskrit textual history, art history, cultural history, religious history of the subcontinent, but unavailable to even most Sanskrit scholars because of a lack of access to the Sanskrit text. The translated chapters deal with preliminary work including choosing the participants for the undertaking. They list, therefore, prerequisites and qualifications, particularly of the acarya, the specific qualities required of the site, and for digging the foundation. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra situates the temple at the center of the universe by means of the vastupurusamandala. The vastupurusamandala is, I argue, both a ritual and a practical diagram: it is used ritually to locate the temple at the center of the universe; and it is used practically to plan the layout of the temple. The rituals marking the beginning of temple construction, like ritual plowing, can be traced to Vedic ceremonial practice, including, but not limited to, ritual plowing in the Vedic fire altar. The text focuses on certain moments within the construction because of the ritual function of these moments. The text is primarily a ritual text, possibly written for the acarya. The Hayasirsa Pancaratra is central to the understanding of temple construction and the rituals around it making the view of these more complete.

This dissertation is about the transmission and reception of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, an influential Hindu scripture, in the Vallabha community of western India through sermon-storytelling performance known as kathā. Over the last couple of decades, elaborate ritual performances of the Bhāgavata, which celebrate the life and poetic memory of the god Kṛṣṇa through scriptural exegesis, song, dance, and reenactment, have become powerful sites of community building for global Hindu gurus and followers. Since the consecrated book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is the living, bodily manifestation of Kṛṣṇa for followers of the Path of Grace (Puṣṭimārga) illuminated by 15th-16th-century theologian Vallabhācārya, all of the Puṣṭimārgī teachers I follow in this study are actively resisting or negotiating the expansion of Bhāgavata kathā into the transnational religious marketplace. For these male brahmin gurus and preachers, “right” transmission of the Bhāgavata is rooted in protecting brahmins and brahmin livelihoods and preserving the binary between the eternal divine path (mārga) and the ever-changing devotional community (sampradāya). Grounded in anticaste feminist ethnography informed by my own dominant-caste access to diasporic Puṣṭimārgī cultural and linguistic worlds since childhood, I consider how caste and power operate in sites of Bhāgavata kathā. In following three gurus who use highly Sanskritized registers of Gujarati and construct their bodies in relation to text and audience in different ways, I come to view kathā as a discursive and embodied practice in which Puṣṭimārgī Hindu brahmin selves are co-constituted. I demonstrate that everyday practices of Bhāgavata kathā, rooted in somatic and sensory discipline, promote Sanskrit education and hegemonic narratives of Vedic knowledge, reaffirm the power of the word and the guru, teach devotees how to discern between divine and demonic souls in everyday life, and produce and reproduce the “virtues” of brahminism in society. More specifically, I argue that kathā is a site in which caste supremacy is taught as behavioral traits conditioned by one’s inherent nature; where brahminical ways of seeing, listening, reading, speaking, silencing, questioning, sitting, standing, moving, acting, eating, drinking, responding, and reacting are perpetuated and molded as virtuous. My research provides insight into how brahminical authority and “right” transmission are constructed in the Vallabha Sampradāya and shows why the Bhāgavata Purāṇa remains so significant for the co-constitution of Hindu subjectivities and Hindu formations today. Through the examination of a storytelling tradition in one Hindu community, this project brings together untapped oral histories and human archives as well as bodies of Gujarati, Hindi, and Sanskrit textual sources to make a contribution to studies of contemporary Hinduism and South Asian religions.

The Avantisundarī is a work of Sanskrit literary prose attributed to the South Indian poet and theorist Daṇḍin (late-seventh to early-eighth c. CE). The Kāvyādarśa, Daṇḍin’s work on poetics, is renowned in the field of early literary and aesthetic criticism. And his other prose work, the Daśakumāracarita, has been the subject of a number of studies and translations. Yet despite being one of the few works of early gadyakāvya, “literary prose,” the Avantisundarī has not received much attention. This dissertation calls for a more serious engagement with the Avantisundarī, and in doing so, it calls for a re-engagement with theories of gadyakāvya. For, even though the work conforms through its ornate prose style to other early gadyakāvya works, it defies several other genre features, thus creating a more complex picture of the prose form. With its biographical depictions of its author, Daṇḍin, the Avantisundarī’s paratextual material also brings to the fore new definitions of sociability and refinement. While the dissertation is grounded in its engagement with the Avantisundarī, it also offers new tools for literary analysis and for thinking about literary representations of the historical author and the social dynamics of the poet in early-medieval South Asia.

This dissertation examines how regional religious traditions in premodern South Asia transformed the Mahābhārata, an epic about a catastrophic war between two sets of royal cousins, into a narrative of bhakti or “devotion.” The two texts at the heart of this project are Villiputtūrār’s fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahābhārat. While composed more than two hundred years apart in distinctly different regional South Asian languages, these retellings share a striking similarity. They both revolve around Krishna, a Hindu deity who became central to flourishing Tamil and Bhasha bhakti traditions. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān each reframe the Mahābhārata as a bhakti narrative poem focused on Krishna.

“Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata” makes two broad contributions to the study of South Asian religions. First, this dissertation offers a comparative study of bhakti poems in two languages from opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent. Despite the plethora of scholarship on bhakti literature, South Asian bhakti traditions have largely been examined separately in their own regional contexts. In this study of Villiputtūrār’s Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, I show how bhakti functions as a shared literary mode in these retellings while also paying careful attention to their distinct regional differences. Second, this project challenges an established position in South Asian Studies that relegates devotional literature and courtly literature to mutually exclusive worlds. The Pāratam and the Mahābhārat have been labeled as courtly texts based on patronage claims in each poem. Pushing back against the court/temple divide in contemporary scholarship, I analyze the devotional contexts of these Mahābhāratas and their intersections with the courtly. This dissertation reveals that the poems of Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān were part of a pan-South Asian development in which courtly and devotional literary cultures were closely linked.

This dissertation traces regional philosophy in religious texts, namely the Kāṇva Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Suttanipāta. Receiving the Vedas in the East, Yājñavalkya and the Vājasaneyins enlivened earlier Vedic concepts and augmented Vedic propensities for asceticism. The region of Kosala flourished during the lifetime of Śākyamuni Buddha, and as a result, the Kāṇva School formed an important part of the cultural milieu in which the historical Buddha lived. The Suttanipāta depicts the Buddha as knowledgeable in Vedic practices and lore and as interacting with brāhmaṇas, arguably both before and after a separate Buddhist identity formed. Considering this background, the relationship between late Vedic and early Buddhist thought must be reassessed. Because value is acquired and erased when concepts circulate, the Buddha’s teaching in the Suttanipāta can be considered a philosophical project to create new concepts and to translate practices that respond to a changing milieu.

Through a close analysis of Yājñavalkya’s interpretation of the agnihotra and Sāvitrī ṛk as related to cognitive processes, this study uncovers the metaphysical meaning of philosophical concepts, such as svàr, vā́ja, dhī́, and prajā, etc. In particular, the dissertation demonstrates that Yājñavalkya’s concept of karma (rite) in the Kāṇva Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa implies what is called karmic retribution. Vedic concepts for the unmanifest govern the idea of karmic retribution and the goal of becoming cognizant of the inflow of unmanifest energy in conscious cognition. The Buddha again revitalizes these concepts when teaching a brāhmaṇa audience in the Suttanipāta. The Buddhist concepts of upadhi, āsava, crossing over to the far shore, and the serpent shedding his skin enliven earlier Vedic philosophy, which was expressed in systems of conceptual metaphors. In this way, Kosalan philosophy in the Kāṇva Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Suttanipāta advances theories of causality and two modes of knowing—one karmically conditioned by past actions (saṃjñā/saññā), and the other a direct knowing (prajñāna/paññā) unmediated by karmic retribution.

This dissertation investigates the Sanskrit works of four authors—Somadeva (fl. ca. 1080), Kalhaṇa (fl. ca. 1150), Jonarāja (ca. 1389-1459), and Śrīvara (fl. 1459-1505)—in the Valley of Kashmir. These authors produced a corpus of unique yet interconnected texts, writing in one of two particularly Kashmiri genres—either Kashmiri translational story literature, ślokakathā, or a regional poetic history, [rāja]taraṅgiṇī. The deployment and development of these two genres from the end of the eleventh to the early sixteenth centuries shows the development of a regionalized literature embedded in and adapting to changing social worlds. The first two works set the stage for this discussion. Somadeva’s eleventh-century Kathāsaritsāgara, a same-language translation of the Bṛhatkathā, is exemplary of the ślokakathā genre. It crystalizes a specific set of source critical techniques and attitudes that are necessary for the production of a Kashmiri Sanskrit historiography. Using Somadeva’s insights, Kalhaṇa fashions a new way of writing history in his twelfth century Rājataraṅgiṇī. Three centuries later in the much changed political and cultural landscape of the Kashmiri Sultanate, Jonarāja and Śrīvara continued Kalhaṇa’s historical project in their own (rāja)taraṅgiṇī-s. Finally Śrīvara translated Jāmī’s Persian romance the Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā into a ślokakathā, the Kathākautuka in 1505.

To understand this development and the texts’ places in their moments of composition, this dissertation undertakes a series of contextualizations not to look for a homogenous or homogenizing “literary culture” of Sanskrit in Kashmir but rather to trace Somadeva, Kalhaṇa, Jonarāja, and Śrīvara’s creative engagement with Sanskrit texts and genres. This dissertation shifts discussion away from the dominant scholarly idiom of cosmopolitanism to see Sanskrit literary production as deeply imbricated in the changing historical context of second millennium Kashmir. In this way I speak not of Sanskrit as a totalizing literary culture but rather of regionally and historically situated authors shaping new modes of Sanskrit discourse in the world. Sanskrit then, in such an understanding, is not a static form or mode to which authors appeal but a vital voice taking part in the shifting elite spheres from the Lohara Dynasty to the Shāh Mīrī Sultans in Kashmir.

Throughout its history, Sanskrit was written almost exclusively by men, while literary theory enshrined the language as inherently male-gendered. This elite male-centric status stands in contrast to the Prakrit language, which represents the voice of women, as well as low-status men and children. Although some elite women did have access to Sanskrit, their contributions are often elided in histories of Sanskrit, or allowed to fade into obscurity. This dissertation examines the unusual literary commentary, the Camatkārataraṅgiṇī, co-authored by Sundarī and Kamalā—two women who were members of the same early eighteenth-century household. Sundarī and Kamalā were the co-wives of a prolific Sanskrit intellectual named Ghanaśyāma, a minister of King Tukkoji I (r. 1730-1735) of Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. Sundarī and Kamalā’s commentary accompanied an earlier commentary written by their husband, the Prāṇapratiṣṭhā. Both of these commentaries focused on Rājaśekhara’s tenth-century Sanskrit play, the Viddhaśālabhañjikā—a play that revolves around a heroine dressed as a man. Together the commentaries are presented as a unitary household project. The project is constructed such that the husband comments disproportionately on the Prakrit-language portions of the play (associated with the female voice), and the co-wives comment disproportionately on the Sanskrit-language portions of the play (associated with the male voice). The division of labor between Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā subverts the fixed binaries of Sanskrit/Prakrit, male/female.

Women who wrote in Sanskrit did not necessarily express their agency as women or challenge the Brahminical male voice that characterized cosmopolitan Sanskrit, adhering instead to the already gendered conventions of Sanskrit linguistic expression. Rather than seeking to recover an authorial “female voice,” this dissertation focuses on identifying the “labor of gender” in the household project of Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā. This entails attending to what gender comes to signify through processes of gendering, how these processes of gendering are interpreted, and how these interpretations are employed in various institutional contexts. I do this by historically situating two unusual features of the commentarial project of Sundarī and Kamalā, and their husband Ghanaśyāma: first is the commentators’ subversion of gender norms in the Sanskrit literary sphere; second is their investment in recovering Rājaśekhara as the pre-eminent “Maharashtrian” poet while writing from Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. I argue that the ideas about gender and sexuality expressed in the commentaries of Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā, were also modes of articulating the commentators’ investment in a regional Maharashtrian identity as Sanskrit intellectuals, as well as a mechanism for reflecting on the local politics of early-eighteenth century Tanjavur. Through this case study, I demonstrate how symptoms of anxiety about gender and sexuality manifest in the renegotiation of formal features and cosmopolitan conventions in Sanskrit writing and argumentation.

This textual and ethnographic project engages touch as a hermeneutic to address questions of medical embodiment and expertise as represented in early first-millennium Sanskrit treatises, the Carakasaṃhitā, Bhelasaṃhitā, and Suśrutasaṃhitā, and in contemporary practice in Kerala. Through a study of the Sanskrit category of sparśa in Āyurvedic ontology, and touch more broadly in epistemology, diagnosis, and treatment, I demonstrate that touch establishes physicians’ bodily and social boundaries, is a nexus for the performance of gendered medical expertise, and is central to communication between humans and non-human selves in the practice of leech therapy. The first main intervention of this study is methodological, as I attend closely to the situated expertise of medieval commentators and sensory experience of contemporary practitioners in my reading of the classical treatises. Second, I argue that the early Āyurvedic treatises articulate significant distinctions in practice, expertise, and bodily boundaries for surgeons and for general physicians in the early first millennium. These divergences evidence a greater sensory intimacy and prioritization of trained tactile skill on the part of surgical physicians in this period. Third, through an examination of tactile practices as represented in the classical treatises, this study demonstrates that specific types of trained touch can constitute forms of treatment and explores the ways that gendered expertise is incorporated into the texts. Fourth, I examine the ways that classical epistemologies are navigated by contemporary Āyurvedic physicians in Kerala through sensory negotiation and yukti (reasoning) in a terrain dominated by biomedicine. The final chapters present an ethnography of contemporary Āyurvedic leech therapy and a close reading of the practice as represented in the Suśrutasaṃhitā and Ḍalhaṇa’s Nibandhasaṃgraha. Here, I challenge scholarship that locates medical agency primarily with physicians or patients and propose vascularity as an analytic for interspecies medical practice.